A Preview of "Dream Keeper”

Don’t miss the romance the Dream Team has been waiting for—Pepper and Auggie’s love story is coming in Dream Keeper!

Available late 2021

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Chapter One

A Perfect World

Pepper

My phone chimed with the eleventh text I’d gotten in an hour and I just managed not to pull it out of my purse and throw it in the nearest garbage can.

Okay.

All right.

Deep breath and…

Center.

Bottom line: I needed to get over it because I didn’t want to be a hater. Hating was such an ugly thing. I didn’t like how it made me feel and I didn’t want it around my daughter. And when the world at large was so full of negativity and hate that it was pushing in sometimes on an hourly basis, the best way to keep that kind of thing from burying my little girl was, when I had her, do my all not to be a hater.

So I had to guard against the hate.

Even if the holidays were coming up and it always got bad during the holidays.

Bad in the sense of these texts I was currently getting from my sister, because she (and Mom and Dad) always thought holidays were the perfect time to win me around to their way of thinking.

Or, to be blunt (and honest), indoctrinate me and Juno into their way of life.

A way of life I’d turned my back on years ago.

You had to hand it to them, they never gave up.

But that was a stretch for a silver lining because it was also a not-great thing that they never gave up.

And it couldn’t be denied, I hated it (rephrase: disliked it intensely) when they put my sister forward to appeal to me in a sisterly/generation-sharing way.

Making this worse, I had to divide my time with my daughter, giving some of it up to her father which was never fun, but especially unfun during the holidays.

In a perfect world, my baby would be with me all the time.

In a perfectly perfect world, my baby’s daddy would not be a liar and a cheater, and we’d all be together all the time.

It was not a perfect world.

This year, I sensed it was going to be even worse because her dad had a(nother) new woman in his life, and from what I was getting, she was all in to win Corbin by showing she could be the best stepmom in Denver.

That happened a lot (the new woman and her wanting to win Corbin by using Juno) and it always involved messing with Juno’s heart. And then, when Corbin dumped her (and he would eventually dump her), part of Juno’s heart would go with her.

It hurt my baby girl.

It hurt to watch.